Category: Email

One of the frequent complaints I hear about corporate life is the time wasted in two activities you cannot quite ignore without incurring a social cost: email and meetings. In this article, I suggest that there should be an email app that gives immediate feedback to a sender, and argue that companies are not doing enough today to limit the prevailing waste and stress.

Read this unusual post – it’s the first part in a two part series – that starts by looking at programs and apps that could make a difference if they existed. They tell us much about how we can make things better today.

There’s a new requirement for entry into the executive suite – one’s ability to manage high volumes of email. In the near future, look for the requirement in job descriptions but in the meantime, if you aspire to high office, develop your skills.

I found an interesting article that gives an early peek at the impact that email is having on our stress levels.

The article entitled Email raises stress levels gives an early peek at some intriguing research being conducted at Loughborough University by Professor Tom Jackson and his team. In a nutshell, it reveals that reading and sending email increases stress, and that it peaks at the times of day when people’s inboxes were the fullest.

Also, email “which arrived in response to completed work had a calming effect,” which appears to back up research conducted by Masicampo and Baumeister and M. Zeigarnik around the effect of completed or well-managed tasks.

I’m going to try to get a hold of the original research, just because it appears to be so promising. In particular, I suspect that email by itself has little effect, but the time demands that email triggers… well, that’s where it all starts.

Take a look at the article and stay tuned to this space for more insights if I am able to learn some more about these early findings.

In different posts here on 2Time, I have defined time demands as commitments that we create to complete actions in the future.

They are created by the individual in his/her own mind. While they are essentially inventions of the mind, they do accumulate in one’s memory, and they disappear or cease to exist once the action has been completed.

That definition seems simple enough, and I use it when I’m teaching a class to illustrate this important concept. A simple example would be watching a television commercial that advertises a discount at your favorite restaurant. You decide to visit before the offer expires, and immediately write down the day and time that you are thinking of visiting.

Where I’m a bit confused at the moment is what happens in the electronic world.

Does a time demand get created when you receive an email in your Inbox (without being aware of it) or when you glance at it for the first time and form an impression that there is something for you to do about it, or with it?

Is the fact that you have an email Inbox an open invitation to receive time demands? Is every message therefore a time demand?

The answer to that seems to be “no.” Just because someone sends you email doesn’t mean that it’s a time demand of any kind, any more than junk mail in your P.O. Box is a time demand. Or a piece of paper that randomly blows into your yard, or an instruction shouted in your direction in a crowded subway.

Information in an email, or on paper, or in the sound waves only become a time demand when they are converted from words by a live recipient. An instruction shouted at a group of people, for example, would only be a time demand for a few.

This might clear up some of my confusion when it comes to email. I can see that email sent to you isn’t a time demand until you have read it. The problem that many have is that they skim rather than empty their email Inboxes, especially when they don’t know what to do with an item once they have determined that it includes valid time demands.

However, does the fact that you have an email Inbox mean that you are inviting potential time demands, and therefore committing to process messages from everyone who send you email?

I say not. But I could be wrong. Legally, a piece of mail that gets sent via registered mail must be accepted by a live person who accepts responsibility for it. That’s not what happens with email.

There is no way to legally guarantee anything via email, even if the the sender hits the right buttons.

Someone who decides to set up an email Inbox and never checks it isn’t breaking the law by any means. However, they are displaying White belt behaviors, and possibly allowing time demands to fall through the cracks.

I’d got a bit further and say that anyone with an email Inbox that’s used by the public is wise to treat any piece of email as a time demand in and of itself, whether or not it includes anything useful. You are committing to spend even a fraction of a second reading, making a decision and disposing of the message. This is true even for Spam that warrants a peek before permanent deletion.

Those fractions add up, of course, which is why many fear a buildup of email from being on vacation.

So, the best practice I’d suggest is to treat each piece of email as a time demand before it’s read, with the understanding that it might lead to even further time demands.

While there are lots of people who complain about receiving too many emails per day, the complaint that “I get too much email” is a bit of a red herring.

While there is a certain amount of email that is written with poor quality (sometimes as high as 65% according to research by Burgess, Jackson and Ewards; Email Overload: Tolerance Levels of Employees within the Workplace,) and a further amount is simply SPAM, there is a critical percentage of email that involves communication required to perform one’s job, career and profession.

In other words, it’s not an extra chore, it’s the very essence of the job of a knowledge worker: to craft skillful communication, manage time demands and make critical decisions that move projects to completion. If there were no email, the communication would still have to be realized, albeit at a slower pace.

What does a professional have to complain about when it comes to email volumes? If they are part and parcel of the job, then each valid message is to be expected and should be welcomed as it shows that necessary communication is taking place, as it should. Email is an excellent medium for most kinds of communication, and cannot be effectively replaced by paper memos or face to face meetings.

It should be expected that with a promotion, a new project or an expansion in one’s accountabilities that email volume will increase. Each step up in one’s career requires further communication, not less, and also greater skill.

The question is whether or not there is a “natural” amount of email communication that is inherent in a particular role. Does it increase to a certain level, and then level off? Or, should we expect one’s email to increase, and to keep growing without any logical limit.

I can’t claim to have answers to these questions, but my intuition tells me that there’s a natural increase in daily messages that takes place from one job to the next. While we don’t know how to measure the difference, or predict it, it seems reasonable to assume that it does exist.

If it does, then there’s some comfort in knowing that email doesn’t come out of nowhere. Instead, each and every valid message appears in your Inbox because you are doing your job well. It needs to be embraced, and managed — even if it requires a user to performance an upgrade to his/her skills.

Certainly, blaming the new job or one’s colleagues is not an empowering stance to take.

As I dug through academic papers on the topic of time management over the past few days, I came across a journal article that was simply amazing in its prescience. It was written by Steve Whittaker and Candace Sidner of Lotus Development Corp (now part of IBM.) It was published in 1996, and they also happen to be the authors who coined the term “email overload.”

ABSTRACT
Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet
devised. Our empirical data show however, that although email was originally designed as a communications application, it is now being used for additional functions, that it was not designed for, such as task management and personal archiving . We call this email overload. We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information management: users often have cluttered inboxes containing hundreds of messages, including outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads. Furthermore, user attempts to rationalise their inboxes by filing are often unsuccessful, with the consequence that important messages get overlooked, or “lost” in archives. We explain how email overloading arises and propose technical solutions to the problem.

What is amazing to me is not the point they are making, as it’s one that’s been echoed here at 2Time many times, especially in my posts suggesting ways to improve Outlook. Instead, what’s startling is that no-one seems to have paid any attention.

Not only have Outlook and other email management programmes failed to offer anything new, Gmail didn’t even exist at the time this article was written, and it committed the same design mistake by not recognizing that existing email management software isn’t fashioned around its most common use — task and time management.

It makes a great case for processing email in batches, rather than continuously, which is a better way to achieve the Zero Inbox.

I’m a lucky one, I think, in this respect. By writing about the process I was following to select a smartphone, I became determined to follow the habits he describes before I got my Blackberry. I have been able to maintain a certain discipline about checking email, and rarely find myself doing so when I don’t have time to process all my messages.

My plan is simple: if I find myself checking email at inappropriate times, I plan to do exactly what the author of the article auggest in order to prevent a bad habit from ever taking root.

One thing I have noticed is how many messages I delete right off the bat, which makes me realize that I need to unsubscribe from a bunch of newsletters and notifications that I don’t really read.

It’s a useful article — hard to believe it’s three years old given it’s relevance today.

This is an interesting post from the third day of someone’s attempt to maintain a Zero Inbox.

It’s quite a diligent effort, and I admire his use of tracking statistics to get some insights into what’s going on with all the email messages received in a day. It’s interesting that so few replies are generated, and so many are simply deleted.

I keep wishing that someone will create software to track these kinds of statistics, perhaps via add-ons in Outlook or Gmail. They’d surely give us more information on our habit patterns than we have now.

I found this article interesting, but it had way more bark than actual bite.

It argues that time management training doesn’t work because most people get inundated by email when they get back to their desks.

At the end of the article, the author backs off the startling claim he makes in the title, because that’s not really the point he’s trying to make. Instead, he’s right about the need for companies to change the expectations around email, and the importance of creating alternate methods for communicating urgent messages.

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